Social networking platforms and networks including Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Xing, and many others are well established and have millions of subscribers. In fact, these networks have become so pervasive that they are commonly used by organizations as an advertising platform as well as a conduit for communicating with their customers, clients, alumni, and target audiences. Creating accounts on these disparate networks is relatively simple and allows individual users to easily create properties on behalf of an organization, whether sanctioned by the organization or not. In many cases, these disparate networks do not have any mechanisms to accurately define or verify the actual relationship of one of these accounts to the respective organization it may be representing. Also, these platforms have no central way to aggregate, consolidate or track multiples of these properties, rate their relevance and relationship to an organization. As a result the social networks cannot accurately describe their relationship with other properties or accounts on other platforms and networks relative to a single organization. Furthermore, there is no way logically organize these accounts based on their relevance and relationship to that respective organization.
The rapid growth and lower barrier of entry for creating these accounts and properties, combined with the inability to easily identify, organize and track accounts related to an organization is a growing challenge for organizations. Given that these properties are created to represent the brand of the organization and communicate with their customers, prospective customers, partners, and influencer audiences, the lack of awareness, visibility, and organization of these properties represents missed opportunities and potential risks for the organization.
Therefore, there is a need for systems and techniques to allow organizations to automatically and programmatically discover properties across social network platforms and networks that are related to their respective organization independent of any one platform or network. Moreover, these organizations desire the ability to rate the relevance of the discovered accounts and properties, categorize them based on their affiliation and relevance, and track and measure their use, prevalence and effectiveness based on these characteristics.